'The Great Global Warming Swindle', broadcast by Channel 4, put the
case for scepticism about man-made climate change. The programme sparked
a heated debate and charges of scientific inaccuracy. Here, its director,
Martin Durkin, responds to the critics.

On March 8, Channel 4 broadcast my programme. Since then, supporters
of the theory of man-made global warming have published frothing criticism.
I am attacked for using an "old" graph depicting temperature
over the past 1,000 years. They say I should have used a "new"
graph - one used by Al Gore, known as the "hockey stick",
because it looks like one.

But the hockey stick has been utterly discredited. The computer programme
used to generate it was found to produce hockey-stick shapes even
when fed random data (I refer readers to the work of McIntyre &
McKitrick and to the Wegman Report, all available on the internet).
Other than the discredited hockey stick, the graph used by us (and
published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the
standard, accepted record of temperature in this period.

advertisementA critic claims that one of the graphs cited by us,
illustrating the extraordinarily close correlation between solar variation
and temperature change, has since been "corrected". It most
certainly has not. The graph was produced by Prof Eigil Friis-Christensen,
the head of the Danish National Space Centre, who says it still stands.
But if the global-warmers don't like that graph, there are plenty
of others that say the same thing.

No one any longer seriously disputes the link between solar activity
and temperature in earth's climate history. I urge readers to look
up on the net: Veizer, Geoscience Canada, 2005; and Soon, Geophysical
Research Letters, 2005.

In the film, we used three graphs depicting temperature change in
the 20th century. On one there was an error in the dates on the bottom.
This was corrected for the second transmission of the programme, on
More4, last Monday. It made no difference. Global-warmers can pick
whichever graph they like. The problem for them remains the same.
The temperature rise at the beginning of the century (prior to 1940,
when human emissions of CO2 were relatively insignificant) was as
great, most graphs show greater, than the temperature rise at the
end of the century.

So what else do they hit me with? Prof Carl Wunsch, of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, who appeared in the film, later claimed he
was duped into taking part. He was not.

The remarkable thing is not that I was attacked. But that the attacks
have been so feeble. The ice-core data was the jewel in the global-warming
crown, cited again and again as evidence that carbon dioxide 'drives'
the earth's climate. In fact, as its advocates have been forced to
admit, the ice-core data says the opposite. Temperature change always
precedes changes in CO2 by several hundred years. Temperature drives
CO2, not the other way round. The global-warmers do not deny this.
They cannot.

During the post-war economic boom, while industrial emissions of
CO2 went up, the temperature went down (hence the great global-cooling
scare in the 1970s). Why? They say maybe the cooling was caused by
SO2 (sulphur dioxide) produced by industry. But they say it mumbling
under their breath, because they know it makes no sense. Thanks to
China and the rest, SO2 levels are far, far higher now than they were
back then. Why isn't it perishing cold?

Too many journalists and scientists have built their careers on the
global-warming alarm. Certain newspapers have staked their reputation
on it. The death of this theory will be painful and ugly. But it will
die. Because it is wrong, wrong, wrong.